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Serafina

ANU - Information Engineering

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Objectives

The Serafina project at the Australian National University explores the potentials of multiple, small, fully autonomous, but organized submersibles. While being small and therefore offering only limited payloads, the full school of submersibles offers possibilities far beyond any individual submersible (for an example of a large, full payload system see the other submersible project at ANU: KAMBARA).

Scientific goals:

  • A school of submersibles which allows for fault-tolerant, scalable coverage (in terms of exploration, searching, transportation, or monitoring) of ocean spaces, while:
    • The number of boats employed in such a school of submersibles should be open.
    • Functionality of individual submersibles should be adaptive according to their current physical (relative) position in the group.
  • Active and passive localization of individuals with respect to neighbouring submersibles as well as the whole group with respect to the environment.
  • Dynamical communication and routing protocols, which explicitely consider and adapt the current knowledge about the physical 3-dimentional positions (including momentum and orientations) of individual stations.
  • Bridging some more gaps between current dynamical systems theory and the reality of actual sensor spaces and timing constraints.

Technological goal:

A small, easy to handle submersible platform which is:
    • very agile.
    • mechanically robust.
    • equipped with sufficient computational power for any level of autonomy.
    • supplied with robust motion control sub-systems.
    • able to communicate spontaneously with neighbouring submersibles as well as to route information thought the whole school.

Scientific and technical challenges:

  • Individual control of small submersibles under real world constraints.
  • Identification of minimal sensor sets for specific tasks.
  • Localization of individual small submersibles with respect to their operating environment as well as with respect to other submersibles.
  • Establishment of fault tolerant, limited bandwidth, limited distance communication methods.
  • Setting up a network of submersibles, which implement distributed localization methods.

     


    Contact for the Serafina project: Uwe R. Zimmer
    Site last modified: Thursday, 2 November 2006
 
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